30/10/06

Tonight I'm going to see Dean, playing with Didi mau (members of Full Moon Partisans) open for Pere Ubu! I am very excited. I will probably drink several beers and hug a beautiful woman. I'll also probably bug a huge woman. Such blessings! INn an alternate universe I'd be dri < error>

Yesterday I was in the office and Butterglory came on Yvonne and Jeremy's colossal shuffle. I'm excited to listen to more songs by this band. I also am excited to help people who are dying

29/10/06

I took this picture of Bastian (left) a couple weeks ago, during a dinner party hosted by my non-Christian friend Jen in Bay Ridge. Less than a minute after I took the picture, I was served my very first shot of Johnnie Walker Blue. I drank and enjoyed the po(r)tion—about an ounce and a half—in six minutes. I was not surprised by the smooth, dusty-leather flavor. This whisky didn't burn my tongue as much as other whiskys. In other words: Johnnie Walker Blue burns other whiskys, and it burns them more than it burns my tongue. Thanks to this Korean-American Christian for generously sharing his premium blended Scotch with me. Each bottle is serial numbered.

The picture of me (right) is from yesterday afternoon. Here's what happened: I put a couple balls of cherry-flavored Tongue Splashers gum in my mouth, chewed them for a few seconds, and got sick of the taste. How sick? Sick enough that I didn't want to swallow. So I spit out the gum along with a mouthful of saliva. The gum tasted like a cherry Life Saver mixed with the smell of Halloween makeup.

META: The halo behind my head is an incandescent (not heavenly) light and an implication of my innate, unshakable sense of personal majesty. I am my own most important person. (You?) The red drool is supposed to evoke blood and, in concert with the partner photo, Republicanism. The blue collar means that Bastian, the dog on the left, is a Democrat. (Why is the blue collar so close to the trash can?) This diptych is an unbelievably political piece about me liking dogs while looking in the mirror at myself: the irreducible basis of myself.In the world of this diptych, I am literally right. Is right wrong? $300 unframed. Edition of 10.

21/10/06

Before we announce our contest winner via internet video, thank you to everyone who contributed captions to crude futures's First Occasional Greeting Card Caption Contest! (And thanks to Steev, who did not enter, for judging the contest.) With the possible exception of Jayson's fun but completely irrelevant list of political slogans, every single comentario contest entry was a joy to read alongside the provided photograph of a gray office chair touching a gray parking meter on a gray sidewalk.

Important note: The Grand Prize winner must post a comentario below, revealing his or her true, full identity. (No cheating. We'll find a way to verify.) If you would rather not make this information public, please email crudefutures@gmail•com.

Our Grand Prize winner will receive: (1) $30 in major megabookstore store credit; (2) an original "vintage" postcard or greeting card from the c.f. collection; (3) a practically unlimited supply of the greeting card featured in the above video, which card we will publish in a somewhat more finished-looking form; (4) a sheet of 39¢ postage stamps; (5) baronial envelopes.

Finally: We're looking into the possibility of publishing multiple versions of this chair-plus-parking-meter greeting card. Specifically, an edition of between 3 and 24 cards—all featuring the exact same photographic cover, but each with a different caption on the inside. If you have ideas for captions you'd like us to consider for publication in this projected series of "seemingly identical" greeting cards, keep those captions coming.

19/10/06

I signed up for NaNoWriMo dudes, anyone else? I signed up with the idea that I could just lazily bang out breathless-lake phrases like the above every night for a month, along with teen(age)y diary entries and fake emails and hit 50,000 words no problem. Then in ten years I'll edit those 50,000 words down into two hundred and it'll work nicely for the liner notes to my solo funk record. No one will read it except for little Broucine, my eternal infant daughter. You know technically this right here could be the beginning to the novel- Except I guess I have to wait till Nov. to start, so no. I might go see the new Borat movie tonight. [UPDATE: I DID NOT GO I TALKED ON THE PHONE I AM STILL HERE]

I saw The Departed last night, it was awesome. There were maybe five or six cheesy elements but they were like large, coherent dollops of sour cream on an otherwise delicious pan of lasagna. You could just scrape them off and then enjoy the lasagna no problem. I walked home weirdly ("are you sure you don't want to just... get in the car, Andrew?") and then wanted a drink. I tried to order a Bloody Mary and the bartender, who looked like a skinny asshole from a made-for-internet porno film, said, "what?" I whispered "A bloody mary?" That happened three more times and he said, "No. It's too late for a bloody mary. I won't do it." I didn't press the issue and ordered a vodka tonic.

I drank it in the time it took for Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" to play. Then I walked half a block to my apt where I lay on my back reading the introduction to Pauline Kael's I Lost it at the Movies [easier on the eyes version here], which I enjoyed. Then I read her review of Shoot the Piano Player, which may be the only film she wrote about in that book that I've seen. I was too supine (or, ah, dumb) to understand what she meant by this:

In the Nation of April 13, 1964, Susan Sontag published an extraordinary essay on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures called “A Feast for Open Eyes” in which she enunciates a new critical principle: “Thus Smith’s crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures—a sensibility based on indiscriminateness, without ideas, beyond negation.” I think in treating indiscriminateness as a value, she has become a real swinger. Of course we can reply that if anything goes, nothing happens, nothing works. But this is becoming irrelevant. In Los Angeles, among the independent film makers at their midnight screenings I was told that I belonged to the older generation, that Agee-alcohol generation they called it, who could not respond to the new films because I didn’t take pot or LSD and so couldn’t learn just to accept everything. This narcotic approach of torpid acceptance, which is much like the lethargy of the undead in those failure-of-communication movies, may explain why those films have seemed so “true” to some people (and why the directors’ moralistic messages sound so false). This attitude of rejecting critical standards has the dubious advantage of accepting everyone who says he is an artist as an artist and conferring on all his “noncommercial” productions the status of art. Miss Sontag is on to something and if she stays on and rides it like Slim Pickens, it’s the end of criticism—at the very least.

In my "anything goes," post-LSD critical apparatus, in my "narcotic approach of torpid acceptance" to the world (and art), where I feel strongly that often I believe everything I read as long as it's written convincingly, I still had a twinge where I felt like she was getting Sontag wrong. But now I think I agree with Kael, and that to claim that art is beyond negation is wrong. I appreciate art with a "sensibility based on indiscriminateness, without ideas"-- I aspire to it, even. I think my breathless lake of a "novel" will surely be without ideas, sensibly indiscriminate (or indiscriminately sensible), but it certainly won't be beyond negation. Nothing is beyond negation. What could be? Certainly no work of art. Or how about a work of art about something indisputably sad? I'm reminded of how

[GLK, writing in, of all places, The Nation!] Adorno is riding the Pickens bomb beyond negation. He's not saying art about the Holocaust is beyond negation, he's saying his own statement about art's impossibility is. Right. Now I think I got Kael on Sontag wrong, too. Goodnight.

18/10/06

Today at work I was doing some internet research and I took with me this leather pouch like a native american medicine bag and sometimes when my supervisors weren't monitoring my internet use I would stuff an url or two into the pouch.

17/10/06

Rafi, the avuncular, murderous Third World tyrant in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, says: 'For me England is hot buttered toast on a fork in front of an open fire. And cunty fingers.'

Wikipedia on the word cunt:

The word "cunty" is also known, although used rarely: a famous line from Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette is the definition of England by a Pakistani immigrant as "eating hot buttered toast with cunty fingers", suggestive of hypocrisy and a hidden sordidness or immorality behind the country's quaint facade. The term was originally attributed to British novelist Henry Green.

"I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the fire service
during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told
me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what
the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed
on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the
church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the
book in a flash